A painter and writer uses her art to overcome traumahttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.16/a-painter-and-writer-uses-her-art-to-overcome-trauma
Author profile of Japanese-American Lily Havey. Lily Havey has spent more than 40 years in a Salt Lake City home that resembles every other brick bungalow in her East Bench neighborhood. But I know I’ve found the right house when I walk up to the door and find it framed by skeins of stained-glass flowers.

Lily and her husband, John, live in a house filled with art. Piles of needlework teeter on a baby grand piano. She retrieves stained-glass pieces hidden in corners — a contemplative self-portrait; a tiger with sunlight blazing in its eyes. Havey’s own watercolors and the bold-stroked sheets made by her calligraphy teachers hang on the walls; hand-knitted sweaters and hand-sewn clothes fill her closets.

Now in her 80s — thoughtful, compact, impulsive, a “lapsed Buddhist” who can’t sit still long enough to meditate — Havey keeps looking for new ways to release her artistic energy. Art has helped her adapt to trauma and change, and she’s still seeking healing by creating — most recently, Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp, a charming and bittersweet book of her paintings and stories (University of Utah Press, 2014).

Lily Havey was 10 in 1942, when Executive Order 9066 uprooted her family from a poor Hollywood neighborhood. She was Yuriko Nakai then, already a gasa gasa girl — always restless, always pushing boundaries.

Yuriko thought they were going camping. Instead, the United States government was corralling Japanese-American families, fearful that these loyal citizens might collaborate with the enemy. The Nakais took the long train ride to southeasternmost Colorado, to the relocation camp at Amache along the Arkansas River.

When the war ended three years later, the family moved to Salt Lake City. Havey won a scholarship to the New England Conservatory, where her initial dream of becoming a pianist waned. She majored in pedagogy and came home from Boston to teach piano and high school English and creative writing.

After 13 years, Havey quit teaching. She needed a new outlet. She recalled a treasured childhood memory of ruby glassware — its reflection and light and shadow — and took a class in glass art in the early 1970s. She began with suncatchers, she says, adding: “It just escalated from there.”

When asked about her life, Havey often pauses, gives a self-deprecating laugh, then offers a matter-of-fact reply. She pauses now, and when she begins speaking about how her life intersects her art, her answers brim with warmth and strength.

Havey remembers Amache “in one sense, as a big adventure. The cactus and colors, the pale green, the rabbitbrush and little yellow flowers — I was enthralled.”

But she also carries frightening memories. Once, on a nighttime dash to the toilet, she was followed by a soldier’s searing spotlight shining from a guard tower. “That felt like a physical blow. I’ve always felt this unease with bright lights, with loud noises, with tight spaces. I have this strong startle reflex. And then I read about veterans returning with post-traumatic stress disorder and how that could be alleviated by reliving what had caused it.”

Havey thought perhaps she could relieve her traumas through art. “But stained glass is rigid, not plastic enough to revisit my life in the camp. So I started painting.”

Her watercolors resonate with the emotions and dreams of a young girl adapting to wartime, given meaning by the same woman pondering those memories decades later. “We are talking 70 years ago,” she mused. “How true are the memories? They are true for me. And so I started showing these paintings at museums. The curators wanted captions, and I visualized the scenes and wrote what I saw. It was as if I had a video camera: For the stories in the book, I just let the movie run.

“I didn’t write, thinking, ‘I’ve got a message.’ I wrote because of a need to vent, and over time, my unease lightened.”

At Amache, each member of Havey’s family sought his or her version of gaman — the Japanese word that describes the skill of enduring the most awful challenges with patience and dignity. Traditional Japanese-Americans urge their children to demonstrate gaman. Endure. “Shikataganai,” they say: “It can’t be helped.”

Havey endured, but she retained her gasa gasa energy and an artist’s yearning. And art has helped her adjust and heal: “As I read from my book over and over again to audiences, the emotional part of it gets less and less.”

Now that she’s reached that place of peace, she’s ready to write her mother’s story. “As a sewing teacher in camp, she became a sensei. She adapted well. My father did not adapt well at all. That experience was a catalyst in his defeat.” Lily Havey has no intentions of retiring until she writes her mother’s book. Like her mother, she has adapted well.

With watercolor, you’ve got paints. With photography, you’ve got a camera. With music, you can read what’s up there on the music stand and play it. Writing is the ultimate hard one. There’s a white page, a white screen, and you’ve got to fill it up.

On being both American and Japanese

When I go back to Japan, it always feels like I’ve gone home. You have all these Japanese people there, and I feel I belong. But then, after two weeks, I am so happy to come back to the U.S. Culturally, I’m not Japanese. It’s still a man’s world in Japan.

]]>No publisher2014/09/15 05:05:00 GMT-6Sidebar BlurbWhat should we do with our blink of time?http://www.hcn.org/wotr/what-should-we-do-with-our-blink-of-time
Natural history teaches us how rapidly and irrevocably the world can change -- a fact we should bear in mind as we enter the new, human-dominated era some scientists call the Anthropocene.The long view of science turns out to be both reassuring and daunting. Life on Earth turns out to be remarkably resilient. Within the story of our 13.5-billion-year old universe, our own lives -- so crucial to us and to our families and dear friends -- look fleeting, gossamer. These paradoxes overwhelm me.

For five years, I’ve immersed myself in geologic time while writing exhibit text for the new Natural History Museum of Utah. Again and again, mass extinctions sweep away millions of years of diversity, and we start anew.

One time period produces six-foot-long arthropods that look like centipedes in a child’s nightmare. Another evolutionary interval yields a flightless six-foot-high bird whose head mostly consists of formidable jaws, a predator that may have hunted in packs. The Mesozoic landscape teems with dinosaurs the size of commuter jets -- and then the strange animals are gone.

Evolution proves relentlessly inventive as life forms come and go. I recognize that humans appear as just one more entry in the evolutionary spiral. But now we don’t just live within this geologic story, we shape it. With that power comes responsibility.

Geologists think of the last 65 million years as recent, and so all the epochs in our era end with -cene, from the Greek for "recent."Pleistocene. Eocene. Holocene. The prefix changes, but the "-cenes" mark "recent" developments in evolutionary and tectonic cycles, even when the timeline for these epochs reaches back tens of millions of years.

Many scientists now believe that we have entered the Anthropocene. In just two centuries of this "human-dominated recent time period," beginning with the Industrial Revolution, we have transformed half of the Earth’s land surface, changed global climates and triggered losses in biodiversity. Animals slip away as we destroy their habitat, at extinction rates 45 times greater than the long-term average (for mammals) and 270 times greater than average (for rainforest species).

In the Anthropocene, 7 billion people everywhere insert themselves into delicately interwoven systems. Bio-crusts carpet the soil in dry country. Disturb that living crust in the redrock canyons of the Four Corners with a careless boot print, too numerous livestock, or a freewheeling all-terrain vehicle, and you liberate dust to blow onto the snowpack in the Rockies. Dark snow melts faster than clean snow, and the spring runoff now comes 50 days earlier in the Colorado River Basin, with stark consequences downstream.

We’ve constructed a desert civilization in the American Southwest that depends on water from elsewhere. When climate change drains the delivery system, will Phoenix and Las Vegas (let alone small towns like Hanksville and Needles) dry up and blow away?

And so I’ve become obsessed with fragility. We can take nothing for granted, from the air we breathe, to the value of our homes, to the well being of our loved ones.

In one recent week, I saw this tenuousness shatter four exceptional people. I attended memorial services for two friends, one who died in a freak accident at 41, a second who died of a disease with no treatment and no cure, at 63. In between, I visited a mentor living with the debilitating aftermath of a stroke and a legendary teacher paralyzed in a bike accident and fighting for breath, year after year.

Watch your step. On this day-to-day level, live every moment fully. Nurture resilience.

When we can define geologic time by our actions, we must think hard about consequences. When we have become connected to one-third of the people of the planet through our computers, our effects multiply; politics and social justice and human rights are no longer local issues. In the Internet-driven Anthropocene, we mightily affect our generation and those who come after us.

We can deal with the Anthropocene with hubris -- why conserve when in a million years we will move on to a new evolutionary world? This might explain the Utah Legislature’s selfish attempt to turn over fragile public lands to the state for development, for management by the few and for the few, even though all Americans own the federal lands in question. Or the fossil fuel industry, intent on maximizing profits until we’ve drilled the last drop of oil, without regard for the people who live nearby.

Or we can deal with the extraordinary opportunity of our few decades on Earth with restraint, blessed by the fragile miracles of our health and acutely aware that we must act with care if our natural world is to flourish.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a writer and photographer in Salt Lake City and was the lead writer for the new Natural History Museum of Utah.

]]>No publisherClimate ChangeWriters on the Range2012/06/01 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleWe need a new Civilian Conservation Corpshttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/we-need-a-new-civilian-conservation-corps
Why not use the talents of unemployed photographers and other artistic types in a kind of Creative Conservation Corps?I'm 59 years old. I've been a professional photographer for 40 years. And now I'm done. Not because I'm retired, but because I've outlived my profession. Technological change has met economic downturn in a perfect storm in which I am sinking. The same seismic shifts have transformed music, journalism, design and publishing. This revolution has left many of us underemployed and coping with low-level depression.

I was 9 years old when the first Nikon single-lens reflex camera reached the American market in 1959. By the time I finished high school, I had moved from a Brownie Starmite to my first single-lens reflex. By the time I finished college, I had begun selling photos to newspapers and magazines. In the decades that followed, I earned my income through stock photographs and devoted myself to writing 20 books about the American West.

The digital revolution crept up on me. In the 1990s, images began flooding the Internet, and calls for submissions from photo editors dwindled. The role of "professional photographer" -- a role that had defined me for most of my life -- evaporated, along with any prospect of selling my pictures.

The World Wide Web has democratized art. Now, anyone and everyone can post photos, drawings, doodles, paintings, scans, videos, novels, poems and inventions for the rest of the world to discover. Photo editors who used to call independent photographers now have millions of images at their fingertips with a flick of the mouse. Advanced amateurs own camera equipment capable of taking stellar images, and many have mastered the nuances of Photoshop. They take thousands of digital photos instead of dozens of slides; they post their images on the Web; they are delighted to see their images in print, and they don't expect much in the way of payment. Those commentaries about the new business paradigm -- describing it as "free" -- have it right.

Without a market, I can no longer call myself a professional photographer. When the light is spectacular, I photograph out of habit, with a sense of joy. But I'm not sure what to do with those images. I no longer really know why I'm taking them.

I feel like a blacksmith or a wheelwright at the beginning of the Industrial Age. Millions of us face this same daunting task of reinvention. The disappearance of our 20th-century professions has stunned us, and we aren't quite sure if we are nimble and flexible enough to cope. We are competing with our children for work, and our wisdom and experience count for little when being a digital native counts the most. America now has a vast and growing reservoir of talent and wisdom that needs new outlets. We are out here, our potential energy pooling deeper and deeper the longer we are sidelined. Why not take advantage of us and match our old skills with new technology? It would help the economy and also enrich society.

Imagine a Gray Corps, a sort of domestic Peace Corps, designed to place mid-life workers as volunteers to meet the needs of American communities. Whether retired by choice or by force, millions of smart and hard-working citizens retain the public-spiritedness and idealism of the 1960s. Create outlets for us to do good work, and we will sign up by the thousands. The challenges are endless, and every person can make a contribution.

FDR started the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933. Imagine a Creative Conservation Corps. Instead of living in CCC barracks tucked away in the remote countryside, the new CCC will grow from dynamic Facebook pages. Pay beleaguered refugees from creative professions to produce a new series of state guidebooks -- fully interactive guidebooks that are searchable on the Web. Bring arts into the schools and public squares of the 21st century.

The downside of change has sidetracked many of the creative professionals in my generation. But there is an upside: We are free to reinvent ourselves. We love to work, and we are open to anything. We would rather spend our days immersed in the joy of contributing than in watching our former professions fade to black.

We are fired up and ready to go. Put us to work!

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). An award-winning writer and photographer, he lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the RangeEssays2010/05/27 09:45:00 GMT-6ArticleA Western primer http://www.hcn.org/issues/40.17/a-western-primer
Western writers offer a generous and inspired list of recommended reading for the president-elect, including a diverse collection of fiction and nonfiction.The Rocky Mountain Land Library asked a panel of Western writers a simple question: What books would you recommend to the next president? What does the next administration need to know about the American West?

Our respondents were both generous and inspired with their suggestions. Although I'm sure they would all agree with author Rick Bass, who wrote: "Anything I recommend would be freighted with its omissions," I think this list contains an expansive Western primer that we can all use, with essential titles that White House librarians should have on hand for the next administration.

The president-elect faces many challenges, and we wish him well. And we hope the new administration knows, in its heart, that it doesn't need to have all the answers. There's benefit, and joy, in listening and learning.

--Jeff Lee, director, Rocky Mountain Land Library, an 18,000-volume natural history library focused on land and community in the American West

Laura Pritchett(author of the novel Sky Bridge and editor of Home Land: Ranching and a West That Works):

Dear President-Elect,

To get you in the right mood for the job ahead, I suggest you start by reading Truck: A Love Story by Michael Perry. You won't stop laughing for weeks, and you'll find yourself captivated by the West and some of its more unruly inhabitants. Immediately following, I would read any of Rick Bass' works for their sheer humanity and grace. The Lives of Rocks is a good choice, as is The Sky, The Stars, The Wilderness.

Next, Alexandra Fuller's new book, The Legend of Colton H. Bryant. Good to know about the land and what's being done to it. Where the Rivers Change Direction by Mark Spragg will take your mind off your own woes by enthralling you with other people's woes.

Teresa Jordan (artist, rancher, author of Riding the White Horse Home: A Western Family Album):

The rangeland conflict between ranchers, environmentalists and land agencies has been one of the most brutal disputes in the contemporary West. Today, however, successful models of collaboration and restoration show us a way to create healthy land and vibrant communities, not only for the West but also for the nation at large. Please, Mr. President, start with the just-released Revolution on the Range: The Rise of a New Ranch in the American West by Courtney White, an up-to-the-minute overview of what works on the ground. Other essential reading includes two books by Daniel Kemmis, Community and the Politics of Place and This Sovereign Land: A New Vision for Governing the West; Beyond the Rangeland Conflict by Dan Dagget and Jay Dusard; and Working Wilderness: The Malpai Borderlands Group and the Future of the Western Range by Nathan Sayre.

----

Stephen Trimble (photographer and author of Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open Spaces in America):

Start with Wallace Stegner, our wise elder, and Marking the Sparrow's Fall, a collection of his best essays. For a case study about the consequences of hubris and denial (useful lessons after the Bush years), see Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California by William deBuys and Joan Myers.

That the West is rural is now a myth. Atlas of the New West by William Riebsame is 10 years old, but lays out the facts of this changing landscape and introduces two crucial commentators, Patricia Limerick and Charles Wilkinson. For more of Limerick, move on to Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West. For Wilkinson, start with The Eagle Bird: Mapping a New West. Photographer Mark Klett brings the ideas in these books to vivid life by matching historic photos with his wry modern images in Third Views, Second Sights: A Rephotographic Survey of the American West.

For a range of authentic Western voices and visions, read This House of Sky by Ivan Doig; Who Owns the West? by William Kittredge; The Anthropology of Turquoise by Ellen Meloy; Storming the Gates of Paradise by Rebecca Solnit; and, for one complicated and eloquent Indian voice, From Sand Creek: Rising in This Heart Which is Our America by Simon Ortiz.

William deBuys (author of River of Traps: A New Mexico Mountain Life and Valles Caldera: A Vision for New Mexico's National Preserve):

Edmund Morris, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt -- on the power of the presidency. Wallace Stegner, Sound of Mountain Water and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs -- essays on the spirit and character of Western lands.

Jefferson Morganthaler, The River Has Never Divided Us -- simply the best book on the border. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony -- for someone with time for only one novel. Peter Barnes, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons -- how to protect common interests in the West (or anywhere). Tim P. Barnett, et al., Human-Induced Changes in the Hydrology of the Western United States (Science, 2/22/08) -- fearsome challenges lie ahead as arid Western lands grow even more arid. Brookings Institution, Metropolitan Policy Program, The Intermountain West: America's Mega-Urban Future -- a surprising, even shocking, glimpse into the crystal ball of regional growth.

Dan Flores (historian and author of The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains and Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest):

For a grasp of human nature applicable to the West: Robert Wright's The Moral Animal and William Kittredge's The Nature of Generosity. For an understanding of deep-time continental history and what the fate of previous empires in the American West can teach us: Charles Mann's 1491, Jared Diamond's Collapse, and David Stuart's Anasazi America. For a sense of the career of the greatest public servant in Western history, Donald Worster's River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell. For a critical look at how an activist federal government might tackle a great environmental crisis: Worster's Dust Bowl, and Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy of global warming novels, Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below, Sixty Days and Counting. For the best modern understanding of Western history as it was lived: Richard White's It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own. And for a look into the future of the West as it might play out, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars novels: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars.

Linda Hasselstrom (rancher, poet, co-editor of Leaning Into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West):

Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank: Berry has been writing about the importance of local economies, locally produced foods, and related topics throughout his life. This book is so succinctly applicable to the precise problems we face today that it may be his best. Kirkpatrick Sale, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision: In these days of subdivisions, polluted imported food, climate change, and rising energy prices, Sale's vision of bioregionalism seems even more applicable than it did 20 years ago. Iroquois League of Six Nations, The Great Law of Peace of the People of the Longhouse: The Great Law, developed before whites arrived on the continent, outlines a system of government in which men, women and nature are all respected, playing strong and independent roles in social, political, and economic life, with citizens holding the primary power. This law served as one of the bases of our own democratic philosophy.

Barry Lopez (author of Of Wolves and Men, co-editor of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape):

The literature of the American West has eloquently resisted the homogenization that a "national character" or a "national geography" might imply. The forceful voice of resistance has come in our lifetime from the likes of Patricia Limerick (The Legacy of Conquest), Marc Reisner (Cadillac Desert), and Cormac McCarthy (The Border Trilogy), revisionists all. I would ask members of the next administration to peruse such writers, perhaps beginning with John Unruh's The Plains Across, not so much to be better informed about the American West but to rediscover the primacy of the local in American life. It is the integrity of the regional voice and the constant need to reconcile the voices of the country's many distinct regions that will make us memorable as a civilization, not the marketing of one voice for all.

Rick Bass (author, editor of The Roadless Yaak: Reflections and Observations About One of Our Last Great Wild Places) :

Anything I recommend would be freighted with its omissions, but for profiles in courage, read Doug Peacock's Grizzly Years -- the story of post-war healing in the wilderness -- and Terry Tempest Williams' Refuge, which, like Grizzly Years, gets at the heart of the intensity -- the spirituality -- that exists between Westerners and the land. John Graves' Goodbye to a River for its elegiac sweetness and incredible land-wrought language; Song of the World Becoming, poems by Pattiann Rogers; anything by Cormac McCarthy, but most topically, The Road; anything by Tom McGuane and Jim Harrison; Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey. Last Stand by Richard Manning, to better understand Montana (and Western) politics. Plainsong by Kent Haruf, to celebrate decency. An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters, and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas by Diane Wilson, to celebrate valor.

Debra Utacia Krol (book editor, Native Peoples magazine):

Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places by Peter Nabokov -- discusses why certain places are held sacred by tribes and examines the failure of mainstream society to respect tribal religious practices. Rez Dogs Eat Beans and Fast Cars and Frybread: Reports from the Rez by Gordon Johnson -- a Cahuilla/Cupeno, Johnson regales readers with his lyrical homage to daily life on a Southern California reservation. Coyote Warrior: One Man, Three Tribes, and the Trial that Forged a Nation by Paul VanDevelder -- an outstanding tale of how one man managed the impossible: forcing the federal government to reimburse the tribes for their losses. Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations by Charles Wilkinson -- one of the best legal histories written covering the rise of the tribal sovereignty movement in the mid- to late-20th century and the accompanying increase of tribes regaining control over water, land and wildlife management in their regions.

Aaron Abeyta (author of Colcha, a book of poetry, and the novel Rise, Do Not be Afraid) :

Bless Me Ultima and Tortuga by Rudolfo AnayaMother Tongue by Demetria MartinezMaking Certain it Goes On by Richard HugoReservation Blues and One Stick Song by Sherman AlexieBlue Horses Rush In by Mary TapahonsoY No Se Lo Trago La Tierra by Tomas RiveraShe Had Some Horses by Joy HarjoMi Abuela Fumaba Puros by Sabine UlibarriHouse Made of Dawn by N. Scott MomadayEmplumada by Lorna Dee CervantesBlack Mesa Poems by Jimmy Santiago BacaWhen Living Was a Labor Camp by Diana Garcia

]]>No publisherCommunitiesEssays2008/09/12 10:15:00 GMT-6ArticleCredo: The People’s Westhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/373/17779
Photographer Stephen Trimble offers suggestions for how
citizens and communities can reinvent their relationship with the
Western landscape.How citizens and communities can reinvent
their relationship with the American landscape

Lifelong locals know their home. They understand
the land's intimate cycles from decades and generations of living
in place, a miracle of stability and identity.

We can never hope to restore or sustain landscapes and
watersheds without the cooperation of local citizens.
They rightfully resent and subvert any management scheme that
excludes them from decision-making.

We need
mutual trust, respect, empathy, and accountability. The
hits and misses of long-term elders can teach us all, while
passionate newcomers -- community members by choice -- brandish a
fierce love for their new home that can reinspire old-timers. Honor
every skill and talent in the community. Involving too many people
is always better than leaving someone out.

Economic health is essential for community
health. If we don't create affordable housing and decent
jobs for full-time residents, the community will lose its
multigenerational roots. The working rural landscape will collapse
into parody.

Ecological health is essential for
community health. Conserve land for the land, and good
things will come to people and community, as well.

Rapid, unplanned growth profits only the boomer, rewards
only the developer, and will in the long run fail citizens and
destroy their sense of place. Leadership must come from
within the community. A master plan is the key to the future for
each landscape -- an inclusive, place-specific vision conceived in
the broadest possible dialogue.

Proliferating
roads and off-road-vehicle use fragment the integrity of surviving
wildlands. Concentrate development where it already
exists. Preserve agricultural land and the wild habitats it holds.

Ranching on public lands contributes to the
American cultural quilt. But cows should have no special
rights. Where cattle and sheep damage the land, eliminate grazing
and manage for restoration.

That public lands
make up most of the rural West is a positive -- an asset.
Keep public lands public to create a buffer between village and
wildland. With privatization of the commons, we lose community
access.

Refuse to drown in the deluge of change.
Channel those floodwaters to power community dialogue.
Continually reassess any plan for a specific landscape and its
neighborhoods. Insist on ecological sustain-ability, health,
preservation of cultural tradition, and protection of biodiversity.
Keep talking, no matter what. Keep listening, no matter what.
Restraint is both visionary and conservative.

Wildness is everywhere, but wilderness is a special
category. Designate and preserve large wilderness areas
on public land wherever possible -- several in each bioregion and
connected by corridors. Establish local and regional land trusts to
purchase critical private lands and hold conservation easements.

One person, one passionate person speaking out
stubbornly and relentlessly, can still make a difference.
Hard work by one individual can start a revolution.

Arrogance is the opposite of relationship. Don't hesitate
to use words like compassion and love and honor.
Depoliticize and humanize the issues, and fling open the windows on
bureaucracy and authority. Remove obstacles to healing.

We are stuck with our untidy web of conflicting
values. We all have our Edens, our devils, our bargains to strike.
We are responsible for planning, making decisions, acknowledging
duty, accepting stewardship -- and for wrangling through as a
community.

Start the conversation before a crisis. Share
information and frustrations and dreams and anger and joy. Stomp
along the riverbank together. Work together. Cook and eat together,
tell stories together. Laugh together. Thrash through conflict to
higher ground. Inclusivity requires trust and openness from
old-timers and newcomers alike.

We call it paradise, this
land of ours. We call it home. Like our nation, the West is in the
middle of its arc. We must remain both vigilant and tender if we
wish to preserve its authenticity. We can do this. We are not yet
too old, too greedy, or too cynical to take wise action together.

Stephen Trimble makes his home in Salt Lake City
and in the redrock country of Torrey, Utah. His Credo is excerpted
from his new book, Bargaining for Eden: The Fight for the Last Open
Spaces in America, in which he explores how we make our decisions
about open space through two stories: the privatization of a
public-lands mountain by a billionaire, and the irony of the author
himself developing his own small acreage.

What's your
credo? Send your vision of the people's West to online editor Marty
Durlin, marty@hcn.org, to be considered for publication on hcn.org.
Please limit submissions to 500 words.]]>No publisherCommunitiesEssaysArticleEverett Ruess lives!http://www.hcn.org/issues/286/15113
Along about dusk, a lone hiker came walking along the
river, traveling light, looking very comfortable out there by
himself. This seemed a little strange, and we weren’t so sure
that we wanted to see anybody in our personal wilderness. The
bearded fellow came over to talk with us. Said he was scouting for
an Outward Bound course, looking for a good route for the group to
follow. And as we chatted, we turned back to politics. We spoke of
our hopes for Mo but wondered whether he could actually win. And
the solitary hiker — Mark Udall — finally grinned and
said, "That’s my Dad."

At last, we have found
Everett Ruess, and he turns out to be Mark Udall. Mark has a
fundamental understanding of our relationship with the land that is
crucial to making enlightened decisions about public policy. His
land ethic is as solid as bedrock. I find it incredibly heartening
that Mark and Tom Udall are in Congress to represent us all. What a
gift.

Stephen Trimble Salt
Lake City, Utah

]]>No publisherLetter to the editorArticleThis is no time to step back from the Roadless
Rulehttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/15008
Stephen Trimble says people all over America have spoken:
Don’t jettison the Roadless Rule. I wrote to Chief Bosworth, suggesting that if he
couldn’t deter the Bush administration from its reversal of
this epic act of conservation, he should consider resigning in
protest. This public act of conscience would draw attention to a
tragic step backward.

In response, he called me to talk.
That the chief of the Forest Service would reach out like this
impressed me once again. His willingness to discuss big issues with
ordinary citizens and his openness about his beliefs were rare and
refreshing.

Bosworth expressed two concerns about the
original ruling: This sweeping rule, he said, which preserves more
than 58 million roadless acres on national forests from further
road-building, left no room for boundary adjustments based on
what’s really out there. And, he added, the Forest Service
needed more outreach to locals who were feeling
disenfranchised.

He assured me that "we don’t need
more roads, we need to decommission roads." He said that large
timber companies are dinosaurs with little remaining power, and
that our 58 million acres of roadless public lands are not in
danger.

I was not reassured. I still feel as strongly as
ever that the Roadless Rule is a visionary act of conservation on
the same scale as Jimmy Carter’s preservation of Alaska
wildlands. Fine-tuning this vision does not require rejecting
it.

The Clinton administration wasn’t perfect, but
the bedrock of its approach to the environment was conservation. It
did not see landscapes and resources primarily as commodities, to
be sold off quickly for corporate profit.

The Bush
administration demonstrates the opposite agenda. It has sought to
change the framework of federal protection to turn over as much
control as possible to state and local officials and to maximize
short-term profit for energy and other corporations. Bush and his
inner circle are methodically dismantling generations of bipartisan
conservation law.

Administrations come and go, and agency
heads can be ordered to give away the farm. If administrators
happen to be weaker than a Dale Bosworth, they may well say yes.

This is the crux of the problem with the Bush revision of
the Roadless Rule. Citizen involvement had already helped to
develop a strong national policy of protecting this nation’s
remaining roadless acres. The Bush plan opens every last acre for
discussion, with states free to petition the Secretary of
Agriculture to lobby for development. Why would we want to revisit
this question, state by state, forest by forest, with politics
pressuring us to modify our already-stated national
policy?

More American citizens wrote to the Forest Service
to support the Roadless Rule -- this powerful statement about our
dedication to conserving unroaded wildlands within our national
forests--than expressed opinions on any other federal rule, ever.
Short or long, every comment represented citizens who took the
trouble and time to write. It didn’t matter where they lived,
because each of us is a public-land owner, and in the America we
strive to create, every vote counts equally.

Conservation
is conservative. Every loss is permanent. Generations to follow
won’t approve if we sell off their heritage casually.
I’ve written again to the Forest Service chief, pleading with
him to think about his legacy. In one scenario, he will be
remembered as the man who fought for the greatest large-scale
conservation action of the last hundred years. In the alternate
version, historians will identify him as the man who agreed to the
largest de-protection action of the last hundred years.

Why abandon protection we already have in place? Why risk any
chance of political expediency overriding national interest? It is
our obligation to think nationally, to retain as many resources as
possible for our grandchildren, and their grandchildren, to keep
the debate over development as far as possible from corporate greed
and special interests.

The Roadless Rule isn’t as
powerful as wilderness designation. But it makes wild country more
difficult to fragment with new roads. Repealing the rule makes
wildlands more vulnerable. It’s as simple as that.

Stephen Trimble is a contributor to Writers on the Range,
a service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a writer,
photographer and naturalist in Salt Lake City, Utah, whose 20th
book, Bargaining for Eden, will be published next
year.